Oliver Stone meets a Brick Wall

Oliver Stone has been powerfully good (“Born on the Fourth of July”). Sometimes, he’s been just as bad (“Alexander”). Now he’s learned that when it comes to the powers that be in Iran, we are all “The Great Satan.”

It doesn’t matter that he made two docs on Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Even those bona fides weren’t enough to persuade Iran’s prez Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to submit…please….to be the subject of a documentary.

“It is right that this person is considered part of the opposition in the U.S., but opposition in the U.S. is a part of the Great Satan, said Mehdi Kalhor, media adviser to the president.

Stone issued his own statement:

“I have been called a lot of things, but never a great Satan. I wish the Iranian people well and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours.”

I’m not sure I’d want to see a Stone doc on the Iranian prez. In part, I just wish the news organizations would do their work to enlighten and inform.

I am certain I’d see a narrative feature from the director that engaged Iran. Perhaps he could make a film that featured participants in nation’s reform movement, since one of the greater mysteries of Iran is the cultural lives of the very populace Stone mentions in his oh-so-oppositional retort.

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.